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The Maltese Falcon

The 1941 film noir masterpiece starring Humphrey Bogart was actually the third film adaptation of The Maltese Falcon.

In 1931, the year after the novel came out, Warner Brothers produced the first movie version of The Maltese Falcon. Sam Spade was played by Ricardo Cortez, who had started in silent films and went on to have a long career that spanned over a hundred films, including a stint as Perry Mason. The femme fatale lead was played by Bebe Daniels who had an even longer career with nearly two hundred film credits. Screen siren Thelma Todd had a smaller role as Iva Archer, Spade's lover and wife of his murdered partner. And watch for Dwight Frye, the versatile character actor of horror films, such as Frankenstein and Dracula, as the young gunman.

The film, later renamed Dangerous Female, is surprisingly faithful to Hammett's novel and similar to the later more famous version—matching it almost scene for scene and in some cases, such in as the funny scene when the dapper little Dr. Cairo (Otto Matiesen, another veteran silent film actor in one of his last roles before being killed in an accident) confronts Spade at gunpoint, almost line for line.

But Cortez is all playboy as Spade, chasing after every skirt and with an eye out for the main chance—and continually laughing lasciviously, it seems. Until the end, of course, when he turns in the killer and suddenly turns solemn himself. But this time he does it without Hammett's speech about the code of loyalty. We never really get what drives him to the surprising conclusion.

The sexual content is much more explicit in this film, made before the studio crackdown, than in the later versions. It's clear Spade is sleeping around, we get to see much of Daniels in a bathtub, and the hoodlums are more obviously homosexual.

As in most films of the era, the sound is terrible, requiring the actors to speak loudly and overact. But the film was successful at the box office and so, as was the fashion in those days, Warner Brothers set about redoing it.

Satan Met a Lady (1936) was supposedly also based on the Hammett novel: only the title, the plot, the characters and the overall tone were changed. It's more of a comedy, with screen legend Better Davis as Valerie Purvis, Warren William as detective Ted Shayne and a host of shady characters trying to get their hands on a jewel-encrusted ram's horn. William incidentally also went on to play Perry Mason—in the first four Mason films from 1934 to 1936.

This second version also did okay, so Warners let John Huston rewrite The Maltese Falcon and make it again for his first directorial effort in 1941. And this one became a screen classic, never to be remade again. The male cast is stellar: Bogart as Spade, Peter Lorre as the dapper but creepy Joel Cairo, Sydney Greenstreet as "the fat man" Kaspar Gutman, and even Elisha Cook Jr. as the psychopathic gunsel Wilmer Cook. ("Gunsel", by way, is a term that Hammett had made up as meaning a gunman, deriving it from a naughty Yiddish word, but ever since The Maltese Falcon, crime writers have used it as though it were slang among hoodlums.)

They're all brilliant, which is to say they all overact effectively, Bogart in particular jumping from trenchcoat cool to tough-guy rages to sentimentality and melodramatic philosophizing. Lorre matches him in going over the top at the drop of a hat. Yet it never annoys, they're so entertaining. It's all timing, folks.

Mary Astor as Brigid O'Shaughnessy, though, I've never understood. I've never understood in the first place why her character's considered a looker—both Gladys George as Spade's overthrown love interest and Lee Patrick as his loyal secretary Effie are hotter in my opinion. But what I've really never really got is why Spade would fall for O'Shaughnessy in any case. For the bittersweet ending to really work—for us to feel the pain of Spade's sacrifice—we have to believe he'd been deeply in love with her throughout the film, and he does say as much. But we never see it. We saw it in the book but here she's just a lying, conniving client out for herself and he knows it.

But it's the writing, direction and cinematography that make this a great—maybe the greatest—detective film. Partway through the film you forget it's a murder mystery as you get caught up in the intrigue among the characters, as you get absorbed into the dark atmosphere created by their greed and the shadowy camera work. It's practically the invention and definition of film noir.

The Maltese Falcon was nominated for three Academy Awards: Greenstreet for supporting actor, Warner Brothers for best film, and Huston for the screenplay.

In 1975 a silly sequel was produced under the title The Black Bird. George Segal plays Sam Spade's son who inherits the detective agency and the fake Maltese falcon, which may not be fake after all. Lee Patrick who played Spade's tart-tongue secretary Effie in 1941 reprises her role to good effect thirty-four years later. Elisha Cook Jr. is also back as the gunsel, slightly older. The film was derided by fans of Hammett, Bogart and Huston as a sacrilege, but it's clever enough for a few chuckles.